The Animal Highlight

A wild bird disappears for 140 years, then returns to one of the most urbanised places on Earth, not by accident, but because a city changes its mind about what nature is allowed to be. That’s the story we’re starting with as we launch a Singapore-focused season with landscape designer and artist Rebecca Shen, whose CAF-funded Atlas Animalia project maps the real, messy relationships between animals and urban life.

 Featured: 

• Rebecca's Hornbill Map
• Singapore Hornbill Project
• Devoted Hornbill Delivers Food to Mate by Planet Earth III, BBC Earth 
• The Ecology and Conservation of Asian Hornbills by F. Margaret et al. 
• Hornbills are more like us than you may think! By Ariana Loehr
• Land use and oriental pied-hornbill occurrence in Singapore by Zaheedah Yahya et al. 
• Signal Group

Rebecca Shen joined The Animal Turn team in 2023 as a fellow interested in researching animals in design and podcast production. She is now an Assistant Content Producer and Designer. Rebecca is a landscape designer and researcher. She is inspired by design as pursuits of worldmaking, especially to advance interspecies justice and collectivity during times of challenge. Rebecca graduated with a Master in Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2023, where she completed her design thesis, Sanctuary State: California’s Cowscape in Transition. Through her design work, she explores human-animal relationships in the built environment, ecological restoration, and regenerative food systems.

Credits:

• Recorded: 16 June 2026
• Claudia Hirtenfelder: executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rebecca Shen: script writer, narrator and co-host, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke: bed music
• Sound effects: Epidemic Sound, BBC Sound Effects, Planet Earth III BBC, Pixabay, Xeno-Canto

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Send us Fan Mail

The Animal Turn
The Animal Turn is the sister podcast to The Animal Highlight.

Culture and Animals Foundation
The Culture & Animals Foundation advances animal advocacy through intellectual & artistic expression

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

Herre de Bondt and Rebecca Shen are back on the show to discuss Rosa Dyer’s season “Animal Collections/’Objects”. We delve into some of the key themes and tensions to emerge in the season including questions of value, colonization, ethics, and practices of preservation. We revisit a season that follows birds, bodies, and objects across museums and beyond, asking how ethics, beauty, and decay shape what gets collected, displayed, and believed. The talk moves from drawers of parrots to a living hippo, mapping the gap between preservation and care. 

• Natural history Museum in London
• Smithsonian Museum
• Pitt Rivers Museum
• Re-Animalization with Krithika Srinivasan on The Animal Turn
• Animals and Waste with Herre de Bondton The Animal Highlight 
• The Complex Relationship Between Humans and Baboons by Claudia Hirtenfelder
• The Lion’s Historian by Sandra Swart 
• Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism (MARS) test finds Oscars so AnthropoScenic in contemporary animated films by Natalie Khazaal, Ellen Gorsevski, and Tobias Linné 
• Animals and Media on The Animal Turn
• Animapolis

  

Credits:

• Recorded: 10 June 2025
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo, guest
• Herre de Bondt, guest
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Learn more about the team here. 

 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Send us Fan Mail

The Animal Turn
The Animal Turn is the sister podcast to The Animal Highlight.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

Rosa questions whether zoos could be thought of as “living collections” that objectifying animals in ways that are similar to the animal objects one finds in a museum or archive.  She considers the internet sensation Moo Deng and asks whether her fame as achieved much in the way of the conservation goals for pygmy hippos. 

• Meet Moo Deng, the baby pygmy hippo taking the internet by storm by The Today Show. 

Credits:

• Recorded: 3 June 2025
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from The Today Show
• Learn more about the team here. 

 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Send us Fan Mail

The Animal Turn
The Animal Turn is the sister podcast to The Animal Highlight.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

Rosa returns to feathers in this episode, this time to discuss the infamous 2009 “feather heist”, in which Edwin Rist stole an invaluable collection of bright-coloured feathers from tropical birds. She uses the heist to open a deeper consideration of the value of feather collections for science and the ethics of collecting and maintaining such collections. 

•  Pitt Rivers Museum
• Smithsonian
• Natural history Museum in London
• The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson

 

Credits:

• Recorded: 28 May 2025
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from Pixabay, Epidemic Sound, and Freesound
• Learn more about the team here. 

 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Send us Fan Mail

The Animal Turn
The Animal Turn is the sister podcast to The Animal Highlight.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

In this episode Rosa steps away from feathered objects to consider how museum collections and archives should be thought of as living ecosystems. She discusses how webbing clothes moths are understood as ‘pests’ and some of the strategies curators are trying to employ to manage them: including sexual confusion and the introduction of parasitoid wasps. 

• Pitt Rivers Museum
• Oxford University Natural History Museum
• National Trust launches pest-control trial combining wasps and moth pheromones
• The Lion’s Historian by Sandra Swart

 

Credits:

• Recorded: 28 May 2025
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from Bill Hayes - I Know an Old Lady (Archie Bleyer, Internet Archive)
• Learn more about the team here. 

 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Send us Fan Mail

The Animal Turn
The Animal Turn is the sister podcast to The Animal Highlight.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

In this episode Rosa focuses on the Oxford Dodo, attempting to trace the life history of a bird whose only trace is a fragile head and foot in the Oxford University of Natural History. She unpacks some of the competing routes the bird might have taken – from being hunted and shipped from Mauritius to being kept in an urban menagerie. She also follows the afterlife of the museum object itself once again raising questions about the interconnections between power, possession, and knowledge. 

• Pitt Rivers Museum
• Oxford University Natural History Museum
• Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
• The Tradescants
• Murder most fowl: Oxford dodo 'shot in the back of the head'

 

 Credits:

• Recorded: 16 January 2024
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from Alice in wonderland Soundtrack, Epidemic Sound, Pixabay
• Learn more about the team here. 

 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Send us Fan Mail

The Animal Turn
The Animal Turn is the sister podcast to The Animal Highlight.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

Rosa traces a Munduruku feather cap from Brazil to the museum case and discuss how tapirage was a process used to turned green parrots  feathers a blazing yellow by using frog toxins, dyes and time. Beauty and pain sit side by side as we weigh Indigenous innovation, care and the cost to animals.

• Pitt Rivers Museum

Credits:

• Recorded: 9 November 2023 Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from BBC Sound Effects, Pixabay, Epidemic Sound
• Learn more about the team here. 

 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/  

Send us Fan Mail

The Animal Turn
The Animal Turn is the sister podcast to The Animal Highlight.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

Using a feather fan as her base, Rosa Dyer traces how Victorian fashion turned fierce hummingbirds into quiet ornaments. The object brings into focus the differences between indigenous mythologies and western ideas of hummingbirds and what the impacts of global trade were on how we understand them today. 

• Pitt Rivers Museum
• How hummingbird and vulture mediate between life and death in Latin America by Nicole Sault 
• The disguise of the hummingbird: on the natural history of Huitzilopochtli in the Florentine Codex Montero Sobrevilla 
•  The Hummingbird Warrior by Ze Frank 
• Animals and Experience on The Animal Turn. 
• Compassionate Conservation with Daniel Ramp on The Animal Turn
• Sonic Methods with Jonathan Prior on The Animal Turn

  

Credits:

• Recorded: 9 November 2023 
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from Freesound, Prelinger Archives, Internet Archive
• Learn more about the team here. 

 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Send us Fan Mail

The Animal Turn
The Animal Turn is the sister podcast to The Animal Highlight.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

We start Season 6 "Museum Collections/Objects" with Rosa Dyer looking at the Huia, a New Zealand songbird whose dimorphic beaks garnered the attention of science, fashion, and empire. Rosa uses the museum object to ask questions about how different knowledge systems value animals. 

• Pitt Rivers Museum
• Sonic Specimen with Rachel Mundy on The Animal Turn. 
• The 1848 lithograph by John Gould 
• Birds of New Zealand by Walter Buller J.G. Keulemans
• Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, Robert S. Emmett
• 'Te Karanga a te Huia | The Call of the Huia', Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision by Sarah Johnston. 
• Huia come Home by Jay Ruka. 

Credits:

• Recorded: 7 November 2023 
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from BBC Sound Effects, Pixabay, and Epidemic Sound
• Learn more about the team here. 

 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Send us Fan Mail

The Animal Turn
The Animal Turn is the sister podcast to The Animal Highlight.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

Fierce, controversial, and caught between worlds—Heck cattle embody the complex intersection of dark history and modern conservation. This final episode of Season 5 of the Animal Highlight explores how these bovines were deliberately bred by Nazi zoologists in the 1920s and now find themselves at the center of rewilding debates across Europe.

Recorded: 14 December 2023 

 Featured: 

• Season 6 Grad Review on The Animal Turn
• The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 by Kathryn Gillespie 
• From “Nazi Cows” to Cosmopolitan “Ecological Engineers” by Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Driessen
• Conceptualizing the multispecies triadby Andrea Petitt 
• American Cows in Antarctica by Elizabeth Leane and Hanne Nielsen

 

Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).

 

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Virginia Thomas, script write, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Sound clips taken from: BBC Sound Effects, xeno canto: https://xeno-canto.org/species/milvus-milvus  
• Learn more about the team here. 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Send us Fan Mail

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.